There's some new Saints Row media available in gametrailers.com

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=1777

To be honest I was never that interested in this game in the first place, but it's really starting to look nice in these new videos. The city seems well-constructed with great draw distance and nice little details adding to realism. There's rag doll dynamics, cars with more realistic suspension and shading, you can just walk into any store or open building without annoying loading times an so on.

Sure, it's a 1:1 San Andreas copy, but it seems they've taken the same concept and really improved it on most areas. It's easily technically superior, but it also looks like they haven't screwed up the gameplay too much. Could it be that we have the first decent free-roaming game here besides GTA series?

ps. Don't you just love the way the guy that played in video 2 sucked ass, trying to hit the old chap with bazooka seven times and missing every single shot. I mean, even my girlfriend could kick this guys butt

Maybe the controls suck like every other GTA wannabe?

And will the game even be 1/10 the size of GTA:SA?

I was pretty amazed with San Andreas' game space in the beginning, but after playing it I realized eventually how bad and undetailed everything was in the game. It's huge, but it doesn't feel or look right, buildings are more of a theatre settings than actual, real buildings.

Therefore I would personally like to see a smaller, but more detailed world with lots of buildings modelled so that you could walk into them, like libraries, city halls, supermarkets, restaurants etc, adding more reality and depth to the experience.

As for the controls, your guess is as good as mine at this point.

in all the hands on previews for this game, none said the controls suck.

Because 90% of 'previews' are advertisments. The amount of good sounding previews that end up getting ripped in reviews are amazing.

I don't believe that's the case so much nowadays. It's true on previews that are posted of a nearly-ready products that are about to ship. In those articles they don't take strong points of view to the game because they don't want to spoil the actual soon-to-be-made reviews.

But, I've found that in these first hands-on previews the writers really give credit where credit is due and address their concerns on different issues that they feel needs to be improved on (game lock-ups, sluggish framerate, controls, bugs etc). It could well be because at this point there's a slim change those issues will be noted and fixed before the game is released.

Reading at the hand-on from IGN, I just noticed there are some interesting team-play options in this game as well. What would be better than to drive around in a downtown with your own gang and deadmatching against other team either by shooting at them or trying to ram their cars of the road at high speed

Sounds like a lot of fun if they can pull it off nicely.